This year might bring one thing that changes everything: the return of Donald Trump to the White House. There is no political textbook in which the Western world’s anchoring nation since 1945 becomes unmoored like this. It would not be the fluke of 2016. Americans would be re-electing with open eyes a man with a bad case of dictator envy, currently facing 91 criminal charges, and who tries to overturn any election he loses.

Never before has a president been actively hostile to America’s institutions and its democracy, upon which rests a global order of rules in trade and security that have kept the world safe for other democracies.